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Document scanning

We have a pile of paperwork in the front room - electricity bills, bank statements, tax credit stuff, the usual. Every time I need to find something in there, it takes me FREAKING AGES to find what I want. I was searching through for something today when BAM! I suddenly had the amazingly revolutionary idea that I should keep all of this stuff electronically.

I know I can easily scan it all to PDF but I'm after something a bit more dedicated. Does anyone know of any document archiving software, something like a database that lets me group scans by type and date, that sort of thing? I want it so I've got my water bills, bank statements, insurance papers all in a hierarchy and text searchable, so I can just look at the Insurance tree to see what docs I've got, then what date they were written etc - just click on a tree on the left pane and see the doc large in the right.

Sounds more like you want more than one piece of software. To start off with you'll need some OCR software then after that i'm not sure. You may already have ocr software if you have M$ office in the form of Microsoft Office Document Imaging which is in office tools other than that is look on the net (My usual source for listing free software freebielist.com let me down on this one). For a business piece of software which seems to be all in one there is Docucabinet and if you're lucky you may find a peg legged version out there somewhere.

Adobe Acrobat will OCR your images files for you (quite cleverly, it keeps the original image, whilst also having a searchable hidden text layer beneath the image)

However, your Bank/Gas Company/Insurance company may be able to provide you with it electronically to start with. Scottish Power provide me with a PDF bill each quarter. My bank provide me with my statement in a variety of file types included Excel, MS Money and Quicken. This could be more convienient than having to scan everything as it comes in.

Not sure about the searching aspect, something like Google Desktop Search may be worth investigating.